By Mattes India Reporter

Aachen: The Catholic Biblical Federation (CBC) plans to request Pope Francis to proclaim 2019-2020 as the Year of the Bible for the entire Catholic Church.

“We are also already beginning to focus attention on several upcoming events. The two most important are the 50th anniversary of the founding of the CBF which we will celebrate in April 2019 and the Biblical Pastoral Congress that will take place April 23-26, 2019, in Rome.” said Divine Word Father Jan J. Stefanów, CBF General Secretary in a statement.

“We are also hoping that the Pope will accept our request that the year 2019/2020 be proclaimed as the Year of the Bible for the Catholic Church,” he added.

More than 346 Catholic institutions from 126 countries are affiliated with the CBF, including 103 bishops’ conferences and 243 Catholic institutions around the world. They seek to continue working in a coordinated way to make the Word of God the center and foundation of the life and mission of Catholic Church.

Stefanów also informed that there is a plan to initiate the process for the General Secretariat of the Federation, after 45 years, to return its place of origin – Vatican City.

“The purpose of this initiative is to make our General Secretariat more accessible – and therefore also better known – to bishops from all over the world during their Ad Limina visits and on many other occasions they visit the Roman Curia, to strengthen collaboration with Catholic universities in Rome where students from all over the world come to study theology and biblical sciences and, finally, to bring our General Secretariat closer to institutions of the Rome Curia for better collaboration of our Federation with other organs of the Church,” he said.

CBF dedicates in a special way to bearing Biblical proclamation and to being facilitators of the loving dialogue of God with the world. It focuses its efforts and resources to bring the Word of God to the men and women of the 126 countries of the world where it serves.

“As attentive listeners of the Word of God ourselves, we seek to help others to listen to the Word and allow the Word of God to enlighten and guide our lives,” the priest said.

A gradually developing but already beautiful fruit born this year is the LectioYouth.Net project, which with the support of the Pontifical Mission Societies of Hungary and Kidermissionswerk of Aachen CBF has launched for Africa and is already working on its extension for Asia and the Middle East. It develops Lectio Divina materials for young people on the Internet with the aim of creating biblical youth groups. The number of users of these materials is constantly growing weekly.

“We continue to work intensively from the General Secretariat of the Federation in the implementation of ‘Dei Verbum’ training courses for Bible Animators in different parts of the world and the beginning of a new Masters programme in Biblical Pastoral Animation, whose preparation is taking more time and energy than expected. But with the help of God and your support we hope to start it at the end of next year,” said Stefanów.